Al Goldstein

Alvin "Al" Goldstein (January 10, 1936 – December 19, 2013) was an American pornographer. He was described in his New York Times obituary as "a cartoonishly vituperative amalgam of borscht belt comic, free-range social critic and sex-obsessed loser who seemed to embody a moment in New York City's cultural history: the sleaze and decay of Times Square in the 1960s and ‘70s." Another writer called him "a hairy, sweaty, cigar-chomping, eczema-ridden fatso". He claimed to have had 7,000 sexual partners. 2Background Goldstein was born in Williamsburg, Brooklyn to a Jewish family. He attended Boys High. He served in the Army as a photographer (in the Signal Corps), captained the debate team at Pace College (for whose newspaper he interviewed Allen Ginsberg), and was a photojournalist, taking pictures of Jacqueline Kennedy on a 1962 state trip to Pakistan and spending several days in a Cuban jail for taking unauthorized photos of Fidel Castro's brother, Raúl. He sold insurance; wrote freelance articles; ran a dime-pitch concession at the 1964-65 New York World's Fair; sold rugs, encyclopedias, and his own blood; drove a cab (he kept his hack [cab driver's] license active until his death); and landed a job as an industrial spy infiltrating a labor union, an experience that so appalled him he wrote an exposé about it for the New York Free Press, a radical weekly. 2Print publications 3Screw In November 1968 in New York, Al and his partner Jim Buckley, investing $175 each, founded Screw, a weekly tabloid. It featured reviews of porn movies, peep shows, erotic massage parlors, brothels, escorts and other offerings of the adult entertainment industry. Such items were interspersed with sexual news, book reviews of sexual books, such as Anais Nin's Little Birds, many hardcore, "gynecological" pictorials, including "Smut from the Past," and articles on fetishes and other sexual topic